lirc mysteriously stopped working when I upgraded to kernel 4.19.66-v7+ on my Raspberry Pi a while back. After an initial battle that lead to no success, I let it collect dust until this fateful night when she returned to her full functionality.
tl;dr
The kernel module lirc_rpi has been replaced …
Open /boot/config.txt and update the following lines:
# uncomment to force a console size. By default it will be display's size minus
# overscan.
framebuffer_width=960
framebuffer_height=540
The original values (and the values derived from a high resolution screen) are much larger which results in tiny text on a high resolution …
Sometimes the remote is too far away to change the volume of music playing through the Raspberry Pi. Whilst at the terminal, alsamixer offers a great solution:
alsamixer